ChinaBlog Day 10

*POST FROM YESTERDAY. EVERYTHING IS OK HERE*
I’ve lived in LA my whole life, and have experienced all kinds of earthquakes, rumbly to destructive. The worst I’ve ever seen hit our city at a teeth-jarring 6.5, and it tore the place apart. Today, however, I sat through 2 and a half minutes of a 7.5 Richter Scale tremor with an epicenter more than 700 miles away. I can’t believe after living for 28 years within throwing distance of the San Andreas Fault the 7.0 found me in China. It was a surreal experience. I was helping one of the other BASE students connect her computer to the servers at studio (That’s my job here. We all have a job, and I got ‘Computer Nerd’. Sorry Sylvie.). Suddenly, I began to feel completely overwhelmed. It was as if there was someone behind me with their hand on my shoulder, gently rocking me back and forth ever so slightly. I thought I was about to pass out right in my seat. I just couldn’t make the feeling that I was sitting on a boat on a breezy day subside. I closed my eyes, crossed them, uncrossed them, tried to focus on the computer screen, but the swaying just wouldn’t stop. Finally I put my hands on my head and my head on the table and moaned, and the girl I was talking to immediately pushed her chair back under the not-so-erroneous assumption that I was about to spew all over the floor. She couldn’t tell what was wrong with me, but her perplexion turned to surprise when, just as suddenly as I had, she gasped. She felt it too. Then we were both moaning and holding our heads like we knew we had cutoff jeans in our future (that was an Incredible Hulk reference. Probably too subtle). I looked up from between my fingers and saw a room full of students moaning and grasping their heads. A group of people standing up nearby took no notice of these events. I immediately arose from my chair, and the feeling of queasiness passed, but the floor still moved underfoot. I walked to my professors to ask them what this was, but since they hadn’t felt the queasiness they couldn’t really understand what I was talking about, and blamed it on a nearby train. I told them that a train goes by every half hour, and I’ve never felt this. I stumbled over to my fellow students, who were madly clawing at their faces in desperate attempts to reach into their eye sockets and steady their sloshing brains with their hands. I got them up and helped them outside. I said ‘this is an-n earthq-quake, Michig-gan people, and this is a-a HUGE one. I’d bet it’s an 8.0.’
‘What?’ they exclaimed. ‘8.0 e-earthquakes lev-vel everything-g under-rfoot. There’s no way it’s that-t massive.’
‘Ah-ha,’ I retorted. ‘The Rich-cht-ter Scale is based p-partly on the amoun-nt of time an earthquake las-sts. O-one of the lar-rgest earthquak-kes ever re-ecorded was in Alas-ska and it w-went on for more th-than five min-nutes. This has been s-shaking now for at least-t half that-t. It’ll be a h-huge o-one. 8.0 a-at least. You’ll see-ee. Does anyon-ne have a sto-opwatch-ch? Let’s get-t it out and time the l-last of the earthq-quake. It might b-be interes-sting to see j-just how long it will-l keep going, and then w-we can-n extrapolat-te to figure o-out approx-ximately the duration of the sh-shaking.’ You get the idea. It was a long time.
We went outside and talked about the rumbling for a while before the earth finally stopped hammocking lazily. When we returned to our computers, CNN put up a headline about the 7.5ness of the shaking. I still have no idea about the aftermath of the quake, because where I live has no internet (due to logistical ineptitude, not natural disaster). I hope I don’t find out tomorrow that a lot of people were hurt.
--Speaking of earthquakily-dangerous living spaces, we finally moved into our new place today. It’s on the twelfth floor of a building in a medium-sized (and by medium-sized, I mean like a medium-sized blue whale) apartment complex in the Beijing equivalent of Beverly Hills. There are sixteen 25-story towers situated around a large green space with tennis courts, a park, a gym, convenience stores, gardens, play areas, and an underground parking garage. It takes approximately 5 minutes to walk from one end of the central park to the other, which we have to do whenever we exit the complex. And this is only one of endless coordinated mass living spaces in just this district alone. They stretch as far as the eye can see, which can be either a long way or a few feet, depending on how high up your apartment is, and are of varying quality, depending on what part of the city you can afford to live in. The further out from the center you go, the fancier and more ridiculous the living situations. All of the buildings I can see out my window (let’s count, one, two, three, forty billion, a trillion bajillion, etc) were built no more than 7 years ago. Many are still under construction. The city is blanketed by an unfinished sea of crane-topped monuments to the unwavering power of the global capitalist economy. It’s quite beautiful.
--Tonight, to celebrate our newfound digs, we decided to go out to dinner in our new neighborhood. The first place we stumbled upon was a Starbucks. Since none of us had been in one yet on this trip, we stopped for some $5 Frappuccinos. We won’t be returning for a while. When we continued down the street we also found a KFC, a Pizza Hut, a McDonald’s, a Papa John’s, and a KFC. If you are thinking I accidentally typed that twice, let me assure you, there is, in fact, a KFC, and then half a block down and across the street, a KFC. Again. If you stand in the right place, you can see both of them simultaneously. Just like that girl’s feet and head. It’s as if America tripped on a Chinese curb and faceplanted violently into our neighborhood. We had dinner at HoSun’s Honey BBQ, which was really just a Korean BBQ place similar to the one we visited two nights ago. Low budget, but good pork.
--Speaking of capitalist pigs, we found Americatown yesterday. It’s exactly like Chinatown or Little Tokyo in LA, but with strange foreigners all over the place. We had real live authentic American breakfasts of pancakes, waffles, omelets, sausage, bacon, hashed browns, oj, and sea cucumber. The place where we ate was called ‘American Steak and Eggs’, and next door was a small cottage-house-turned-restaurant called ‘Grandma’s Pantry’, and next door to that was a small hole-in-the-wall called ‘McDonald’s’. When we walked in the front door of AS&E we were greeted with a round of ‘Hellosirandyouarewelcomeinthisrestaurant’ by a nice Chinese lady standing behind the typical diner podium with a sign on it saying ‘please to be seated wait sir’. We walked past a few dozen or so nonchalant glances from the largest collection of white people this side of the Forbidden City, and were treated to a wonderfully wholehearted attempt at breakfast diner food. I ordered a pecan waffle, which was the same as the regular waffle, which was the same as the pancakes, but with a grid pattern and some nut shavings on the top. My roommate was so excited about ‘real food’ that he powered through a large shrimp and cheese omelet (with extra cheese) and a stack of strawberry pancakes sprinkled with granulated sugar. I ordered oj with my meal, and they went in back, mixed up some Tang, threw some pulp in, and contentedly charged me 20 Yuan for their effort. The oj was almost as much as my waffle. I guess that’s appropriate, given that the ‘juice’ was the best thing on the table. Actually, my breakfast included scrambled eggs, and they only put a tiny bit of garlic and soy sauce in them, so they were pretty good. I just kept thinking about how Chinese people must feel going into a ‘Chinese Food’ place in the States, looking at the crap we proudly serve them, eating it with a fake smile and a sigh. I now know precisely what they are thinking. It’s a little bit disappointment, but it’s also a little bit happiness that at least someone’s trying. It’s the thought that counts.
-c